Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Here in Japan, it would seem almost impossible. Just recently build a house. It took almost as long to just get the approval from the city vs the time to build. Additionally, AFAIK you are technically not allowed to touch anything with electricity or water without license. Forget about connecting to the city grid.
Depends on the laws in your local area. But many places where I live allow you to build your own home as long as you follow the building codes.
But nothing's stopping you from buying one of these and hiring a professional to do the build. Would still be much cheaper than buying a property with a home on it already.
I don't know where you live but in the Midwest US around medium-sized cities, it costs _significantly_ more to build vs buy unless you inherit or otherwise somehow luck into some cheap land.
Building involves a surprising number of large one-off costs: clearing the land, excavation, running utilities, digging a well, installing a septic field, getting permits and inspections, legal fees for contract review, etc. None of these are reflected in the market price of a middle class SFH. This is the main reason housing developments are so popular, the developer is able to amortize these startup costs over 30-50 houses all at once which is the only way they can build new houses that are price competitive with the rest of the market.
My father-in-law is in his 70s. He built a new house in 2016. He's a builder so he could do almost all of the work himself (apart from electrical and heating) with two hired helpers. The concrete was poured by a company. The roof trusses were designed and premanufactured, then delivered to site and installed by him and his guys. I think he had someone come in for some tiling jobs. Other than that, it was all off-the-shelf material.
All in, he spent around $300k including the plot.
Then COVID happened. Now, similar houses on his street sell north of 800k.
Aren't they all reflected in the market price of housing?
It's just that a lot of existing housing is out of date (so prices below new construction) and people work to profit by reducing them below what an individual can achieve working on their own.
In my small town, houses that are "move in ready" command a premium, because higher end buyers are less willing to put up with the typical condition of the aging housing stock.
The newly built community homes are much cheaper. They are just commodities though. From what I have seen the construction is very poor and most people are going to want upgrades across the board ($50k+ more).
Crazy expensive to build vs. buy. A modest 1600sq ft home is $400k+ to erect on your lot. You will have thousands out of pocket before you get there and if you carry a construction loan you are paying raw interest the whole time.
When it comes to what's on your property, every place I've lived in the US lets you do your own work as long as you follow code, you just can't do professional work for other people.
Connecting to the grid might be different though - I've never had to mess with that.
I only know my particular area, but as a homeowner, I can do any electrical work I want on my dwellings. If I owned a rental, I couldn't do electrical work on that. I still have to pull permits and pass inspections, but it's really not as bad as most people assume. Just do competent work and check your wire gauge derating math a few times before you start pulling things.
My main panel, outside, is effectively "half mine, half the power company's." The side with the meter in it is tagged off and I can't get into it without going through power company indicators. But everything on the other side, with the breakers, is my problem. Then everything from the box out to the pole transformer is the power company's problem.
Again, this isn't going to be broadly true everywhere, but that's the usual breakdown of things, and outside a few areas in the US, you are legally permitted to do electrical work on your residence.
I mean, I did my own massive ground mount solar install, grid tied, without having to bother an electrician. It just required the normal permitting process and such.
(we did a DIY addition build during COVID in the US in 2021)
In Michigan, you are absolutely allowed to do your own build on your own land. It just has to pass code inspection, and it has to pass at every stage. (i.e., they want to inspect structural/electrical/plumbing/hvac/etc, before you put drywall up, to ensure things are actually OK underneath, and then inspect it again after drywall is applied).
Getting utilities can be hard and expensive if you are building off-grid. But there are so many vacant lots that already have power+water+gas at the street, that you don't really have to do that unless you really want to live in a specific off-grid location. (Suburbs and some townships make a lot of their money from this, so they usually want you building near their pre-existing utilities and hooking up to it)
Sewage tends to be the hardest part -- some places have "most" utilities, but not waste & water. And people assume they can just put in a leech field "septic tank", but since most of the state is already swampland, you have to be careful of how and where you put that, so you don't poison the water. (They will make you get a land survey to prove your location is safe to leech from, and they will inspect your install, and yes people complain all the time about it, but when they didn't do this, people did poison the water all the time, and then accidentally drank their own waste water and make themselves sick, or accidentally poisoned their neighbors water and made those folks sick, etc).
People complain about the licensing and permitting and inspections, but honestly, it's all been extremely fair and pretty quick and cheap. If you aren't passing your inspections here, you're likely doing something grossly negligent (or are about to do something grossly negligent).
I can give you an anecdote about my parents trying to permit a new garage building on their property in southern California, the process was anything but fair, cheap or quick. The inspector actually raised an unrelated issue on their property about a patio cover that was installed by a previous owner and has been standing for 30+ years, they wanted him to pull a building permit and pay all the inspection fees for it before they would even begin to process his garage permit. Including digging around one of the footings for the existing patio cover to see how deep the footings were. Ultimately they paid some adjusted fee, didn't even have anything inspected. Just basically were extorted by the city in my view of things.
I had the exact same thing happen to a house I owned in Utah. I had purchased a house that had a mother-in-law apartment in it, which I could offer my parents to live in, as my Dad was in bad health waiting for a transplant.
At one point, after about 5 years of me living there, there had been a leak under the sink in the bathroom and at the same time the stove also went out (within the same month). We were doing better financially so we decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the mother-in-law suite as it was starting to show its' age. We wanted to improve the bathroom significantly (remove the tub and add a walk-in shower), update the very dated materials, and add a gas-line to the stove (since the main kitchen upstairs had a gas stove already, and the gas water heater was on the opposite side of a wall where the mother-in-law stove goes).
Anyway, we had a plumber come out and quote the work and he wanted to get a permit for the work. That was fine, I wasn't intending to do anything shady, so we requested a build permit and the inspector came out and told us we weren't supposed to have anything in the basement at all. No kitchen, no side entry doorway, no bathroom, no two bedrooms, no kitchen. The entire mother-in-law suite was around 1,000 sqft, it wasn't insignificant, and he was saying the previous owner never permitted it.
We basically got notice from the city that our house was illegal and could be condemned if we didn't first pay permitting and get inspections on the current home, before we do any new work. Keep in mind, I had owned this home for over 5 years when this was happening, I never did the original work, and the original work was now so old it needed to be replaced and updated. The plumber estimated by the plumbing work and code it was built to that it had to have been built at least 20 years prior. Based on the materials and designs of things like vanities, tilework, trim, kitchen finishes, etc I would have estimated that it was also about 20 years old.
So yeah we basically got extorted to pay the permitting for work that was so old it was now being replaced. Then we had to do the same thing again for the replacement work. Then on top of that, then next year our house was assessed at $180k more money, increasing property taxes significantly. This was in ~2016.
Here in SF, there's an online permit database accessible from the property lot database [1]. A new or prospective owner can check for permits for past additions. I don't know how far back it goes, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 40 years.
No guarantee of course that there would be something similar in your area, let alone accessible anonymously. Not to mention that maybe it wasn't obvious that the in-law was an addition, and that it's civilized to assume that the previous owners didn't cheat.
.. are truly crooked in many wealthy areas of California (and elsewhere) today. Everyone directly involved benefits from it, the only direct loser is the newcomer..
In my locale, the only thing that matters is passing the code inspection. I have friends who have done major remodels, including additions. The piece of advice I got was to talk with your inspector before starting. In my city, they have office hours and will help people avoid surprises such as finishing the interior walls before having the electricals inspected -- stuff like that.
Sure. It's completely possible to build a house in the US. But it's a big place.
The rules vary by state (50), by county (Ohio alone has 87 counties), and municipality (if in a city) or township (if rural), and/or other AHJ. There are thousands of combinations of rules so it's hard to generalize beyond "Yes, it's possible."
Some areas have very strict zoning, building codes, and inspections. These can be challenging to build in, with oversight over many details, but it can be done and people do accomplish building homes all the time in these conditions.
Meanwhile, some other areas have no zoning at all and only the most rudimentary of building codes (rudimentary like "There must be a working sewer connection or septic system" and approximately no other requirements). As a practical matter, in these places a person who owns some land can build what they want and nobody is empowered to tell them not to.
And, of course: There's a myriad of in-between variations.
To add to the sibling comments which have already covered the general idea; in many places in the US you can also do your own work and then have an inspector sign off on it.
>Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Yes, but you're at the mercy of the discretion of and have to pay rent (metaphorically) to potentially a ton more parties than you would have 100yr ago. You're gonna need several (local, but perhaps 1-2 state depending on situation) government inspections all of which may involve having to track down some licensed professional and then pay them a fee for inspecting your work.
I think in a "normal" case you can expect to shell out for electrical, plumbing, sewer/septic, HVAC, plans/engineering, environmental BS depending on distance to regulated stuff (wetlands usually) inspections and sign offs. There's probably one or two things I'm forgetting and perhaps one or two can be omitted on a case by case basis. A bunch of municipalities are gonna add their own BS on top of "the usual" stuff, like permits for tree cutting, permits for a construction dumpster and whatnot.
And keep in mind, some of these parties are likely to go out of their way to try and f you one way or another and/or give you the runaround until you go away because they don't want to deal with homeowners, they want to deal with businesses.
Also worth nothing that some municipalities expect strict goose stepping compliance. Some really DGAF what individuals engaged in noncommercial development (i.e. building your own house with the intent to live in it) and so long as you're not building rickety garbage they would rather you just not call them until it's done (though obviously they can't say that).
In regard to having to have some licensed professionals inspect the work, you'll still often have to do that even if you hire someone to do the job. It is just often baked into the cost to do the job, and the people doing the job will do all the legwork for you.
This is great! I am currently thinking about getting a weekend paper newspaper like FT weekend. Reason being: I read news on my phone too often. And the news create negative emotion without being useful. News on paper and only once per week would make me more relaxed.
His paper printer news daily would be great to bridge the gap in between!
On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any hackable open source printer like this available?
I cannot recommend FT.
I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side.
That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.
Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round.
Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.
Ah yes. Filling newspapers with petty leaflets of spam the night before and then having to get up at 6am in the cold rain to get lost cycling around an estate block smelling smells of god knows what only to be paid less than minimum wage. what fun times.
At least I could then afford to buy a packet of cigs, and then upsell them to the chavs for a higher price...
You can see Mount Fuji from ridiculous far away. It is a real "lone mountain".
While there are higher mountains in the Swiss alps, they are in between other mountains.
I am doing the same recently. It took me a while to learn this (because I started life without much access to money). Buying convenience is a thing!
Some examples: I pay for my search (Kagi). I picked my home builder by how they took my wishes into account. Instead of the chain restaurant, with disinterested staff, go to the one where the person behind the counter is the owner.
I think good customer services can be your special sauce when making a business!
I use it for similar reasons! But I do not have the pain point?
For me secure boot just worked out of the box with Tumbleweed? Maybe old information?
Nvidia official driver installation is a bit annoying. You need to add the nvidia repo. It is the same problem for other linux distros, like debian.
The process for using MOKutils to re-enroll the module key, requiring yet another password that I can't easily get from my password manager with every single driver update is a PITA. Maybe it's just that fragile on my system.
The repo is official, but it's not installed by default. It's very easy to add as there's a package that adds it using the new services system, and zypper can auto-detect the correct packages for the hardware:
I am not 100% certain because I did not pay that much attention but I am fairly confident that the nVidia repo was set up without me entering any command when I installed Tumbleweed on a new desktop 3 weeks ago.
Yeah, I'm sure it's braindead simple if you regularly do systems stuff on Linux, like I used to. But not having done that for a while, I needed to a) find the info for the different ways to install the driver on this distro and figure out which one applies, b) figure out which specific driver version you need, c) install it and then figure out which of the few dozen other packages in that repository you need to install, d) manually blacklist the nouveau driver which it inexplicably still tries to load, e) reboot which automatically bookts into MOK utils which asks you for a password and seemingly doesn't accept anything you enter, f) figure out how to re-run MOK Utils on boot to enroll the module, g) futz around setting the MOK Utils password until you're about to throw your computer out the window, h) figure out that the utility doesn't work with non-querty keyboard layouts, i) have to re-enroll every time the driver updates.
Sure, it might be simple as far as Linux administration tasks go, but I'm not using Linux because I like dickering around with Linux-- I need a POSIX system that supports my hardware to use as a professional tool. Regardless of whether or not it's a fair comparison, my comparison is to the experience with Windows and MacOS. It's not a judgement of the competence of the people that made it or the overall product quality-- it's apples to oranges. Unfortunately, it's Apples-to-Oranges for a lot of UX and QoL factors as well.
Well, if you are asking for exactly one, I can tell: It starts with an "N" and has been around since the 1800s.
But besides that, I can not think of any...
I think it is very hard to consistently make good games and also earn money. A few months ago a smaller German gaming company closed (Mimimi). All their games were well received. But even so it was too difficult to continue with just making "good" games: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/shadow-gambit-studio-mimimi...
While not necessarily related to Wikipedia, I focus a lot on the offline usage of my phone: I fly a few times per year and I like to travel. Even in 2023, internet is not always working so great. Two important things for me are:
* Offline Map - The times I need a map and I am offline are strongly correlated.
* Stardew Valley - Great game, pay only once, play offline, no ads.
Wikipedia does sound cool though. Maybe I'll trial one of the reduced size versions.
Completely offline, shows more info about the landscape than Google/Apple Maps, especially for hiking, has almost all businesses, has driving directions.
It heavily depends on your area though. It's often way behind Google Maps, in every populated place I've tried it in the USA. (Businesses are years out of date, roads are missing or incorrect, etc.)
I do contribute to OSM, but day to day I find Google Maps + Alltrails + Trailforks to be more practical (all paid, closed source, but high quality data).
Google Maps also has free offline tiles. Those other two have paid offline maps, but it's worth it to not have to always wonder if your map is accurate.
When your phone can “hear” a cell tower (and thus thinks it’s online) but doesn’t have enough signal to get any data, apps like Google Maps and Gaia will often hang instead of showing you the downloaded map data that’s on your phone.
Put your phone in airplane mode to fix that behavior.
Second this. Even some cheap (~$30 per night) guesthouses have onsen. Also you can often get into the fancy hotel onsen by paying a small fee, even when you are not staying.
Onsen are geat! I love them. I especially recommend outdoor onsen (Called rotenburo) in winter when it is snowing.
You have to get over the first hurdle to be totally naked with strangers. But I often go at a time when it is mostly empty.
Disclaimer: I live in Japan.
Here in Japan, it would seem almost impossible. Just recently build a house. It took almost as long to just get the approval from the city vs the time to build. Additionally, AFAIK you are technically not allowed to touch anything with electricity or water without license. Forget about connecting to the city grid.